Corned beef confidential

Inside the North Side meat factory: Watch the `oysters'

smell the pickle room

Steve "Schmitty" Schmidt starts wear ing his green leprechaun hat and blinking shamrock bowtie to work. Not that he cares that much about St. Patrick's Day - he's not even Irish.

Schmidt does, however, care about corned beef - a lot. Never mind that corned beef isn't necessarily Irish, either. The hat and tie are a purely benevolent gesture on his part, meant to foster enthusiasm among his colleagues. "I'm kind of a nut," he says.

He has been making the brine-cured brisket at Vienna Beef since he was 16, having joined the company in the corned beef curing room, to help support his family while going part time to high school.

That was 36 years ago, and all that time on the job is one reason he's the resident expert and manager of corned beef production for the company, whose first store was at 417 S. Halsted St. It was opened in 1894 by two Austro-Hungarian immigrants who had had success with their wieners at the World's Columbian Expo.

But he's also (judging from a recent tour) as wired as Willy Wonka when it comes to the four-part workings of the plant's corned beef operations -- the boning, injection, tumbling and cooking areas -- which take up about a third of the plant's 140,000-square-foot operation at 2501 N. Damen Ave., where it moved in 1972, and where soups, chili, pickles and, obviously, hot dogs are also made. He loves his job, and, he claims, he still loves to eat the product.

"Watch your step!" he yelled, at 9:30 on a recent morning (the day starts at 4:30 a.m. for him), after instructing a party of C.B. fans to don hairnets and smocks on their way into the first processing area, the cavernous buzzing, banging wet-floored space known as the "boning room." Here, bright red bone-in brisket arrives in 1,800- to 2,000-pound vats -- plastic-lined cardboard combo bins -- and men and women process about 50,000 pounds !!of corned beef a day, looking in their white lab coats like surgeons doing cut-rate surgery.

"Briskets are .....?" he said, waiting for someone to fill in the blank. Then he slapped his hands his chest: "The breast area."

He was standing a few feet away from a "piece worker," who gets paid by the piece and was dispatching a chunk of beef big enough for Fred Flintstone with such ease and speed he may as well have been carving Jell-O.

"He's taking the finger trimmings off the bone," Schmidt said, as the man slid his extremely sharp knife between the ribs, and the meat fell away. "He takes the top off -- that's called the oyster. That goes on the line," Schmidt said, as the worker lopped off a pretty red slice and threw it on the conveyor belt.

Nothing is wasted

The trimmings rode elsewhere ("Nothing gets thrown in the garbage. That's very good for sausage") and the boned brisket showed up across the room, where another man, with a large metal hook in one hand and what looked like a pirate's machete in the other, sculpted it into a prettier piece of meat.

"He'll cut the high fat off the side, the collar off the other side," he said, "but you want [some fat]. People who go to buy meat look for the leanest thing out there. That's the dumbest thing to do. ..... You cook it and then you cut it off."

From there the meat traveled to the grading station, where it was inspected, thrown on a scale, then flung through the air into huge containers separated by different grades and weights.

"Next, it gets transferred to the pickle room; come on," Schmidt instructed, as he ran/walked with great purpose into a chilly area off the boning room that did indeed smell like pickles. Which is to say it smelled delicious.

The way the brine gets put in the meat is one of the real showstoppers of the process. "Here's the cool part," said Schmidt, leading the way. "That's the injection machine over there. If you get splashed, don't blame me."

A conveyor belt subjected the large slabs to merciless poking by needles, inside a metal machine that spewed brine everywhere and looked like a giant pizza oven.

"What that basically is doing is a couple of different things: distributing the flavoring throughout the meat. And because there's so many needles it's also tenderizing the meat at the same time," said Schmidt, as the belt dumped the meat into a vat for transfer into brine, where it would cure.

Only about a third of the corned beef the plant produces is cooked before being packaged for sale; the rest is sold raw or pickled.